page_title: Virginia Dox
hierarchical_section_title: Virginia Dox
caption_attribution_description: English: Educator, missionary, lecturer and Whitman College fundraiser Virginia Dox (1851-1941), on her pony on the main street of Oxford, Idaho in 1885. Published in a Hartford Courant profile of Dox in 1928. Dox was born in Wilson, New York, graduated from the Mount Carroll Seminary (today's Shimer College) in 1875, and subsequently worked as a missionary and educator in Oklahoma and the intermountain West; after her health began to fail, she spent the last four decades of her life in Hartford, Connecticut.
context_page_description: Virginia Dox was a 19th-century American missionary, educator, and explorer in the Intermountain West, and later a noted public speaker and fundraiser for educational institutions including Whitman College and Berea College. Under the auspices of the New West Education Commission, she founded schools in Idaho and New Mexico. She was the first white woman to explore the Grand Canyon, and also the first white woman to visit the Havasupai. Her vivid depictions of Western life earned her the nickname of "the female Bret Harte".
  In the course of her travels, Dox lived among 23 Native American tribes. She was an adopted member of nine tribes: the Old Town Penobscot, Delaware, and Osage, and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. She became a faculty member of Whitman College, in recognition of her fundraising work, but was prevented from taking the position by a sudden decline in health.
context_section_description: Virginia Dox (October 31, 1851 – February 14, 1941) was a 19th-century American missionary, educator, and explorer in the Intermountain West, and later a noted public speaker and fundraiser for educational institutions including Whitman College and Berea College.  Under the auspices of the New West Education Commission, she founded schools in Idaho and New Mexico.  She was the first white woman to explore the Grand Canyon, and also the first white woman to visit the Havasupai.  Her vivid depictions of Western life earned her the nickname of "the female Bret Harte".
  In the course of her travels, Dox lived among 23 Native American tribes. She was an adopted member of nine tribes: the Old Town Penobscot, Delaware, and Osage, and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora.  She became a faculty member of Whitman College, in recognition of her fundraising work, but was prevented from taking the position by a sudden decline in health.
caption: Virginia Dox on her pony in Oxford, Idaho in 1885.
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